Hopefully you’ve read my last post giving the first of two examples of why I distrust this Marxist propaganda outfit.
Either way, here is the second example which relates to the BBC’s coverage of the Covid19 ‘pandemic’.
And I should mention that I really could have chosen any one of countless articles I have seen, many of which I have saved in my “Covid” bookmarks folder, a folder I should probably rename “misinformation”! I bookmarked this one back in September when I first saw the article. It was the top result on Google for searches about ‘Vaccine Efficacy’.
I have included a screenshot of the article below for ease of reading but you can view the original here if preferred. It was published on September 14th 2021.
Please note in particular the final two lines. This is the “Conclusion” line, where they get to tell you what the ‘numbers mean’. Kind of them to save you having to do any thinking to interpret the ‘the numbers’ for yourself isn’t it?
It’s interesting that my wife actually heard this ‘news’ on the BBC on TV when at a friend’s house. She was naturally shocked. And being truly open-minded and critical (even of her own position), she set out to investigate it further as she was about to re-consider her position on not getting vaccinated solely based on this piece of ‘news’. And I wonder how many did do exactly that.
In her words as expressed to me:
“If this is true, surely we should be getting the vaccine?!”
It’s certainly presented as an absolute ‘no-brainer’ by the trusty BBC. Who can argue with those numbers?!
256 of 51,000 deaths were in vaccinated people! Ergo… 50,744 out of 51,000 deaths were in UNvaccinated people!
That’s surely a Slam Dunk if ever I saw one! Gotcha you vaccine ‘hesitant’ idiots, conspiracy nuts, bla bla bla. Knowing this is the BBC we are talking about, she dug into it further, ya know, just to be on the safe side!
So off she went, and what she found (after laborious hours of reading deliberately over-complicated documents and reports, difficult to navigate websites including govt/ONS/NHS ones etc) was what seemed like a pretty big ‘catch’.
Every time we have gone through this kind of process, our own personal ‘fact-check’ if you will, we always find a ‘catch’. This pattern of finding catches in mainstream media, BBC in particular, suggests deliberate dishonesty (rather than a little oopsie) from those we PAY to inform us, those who claim the moral high ground on truth and impartiality, those who earn money (via govt legislation) from anyone who owns a TV. After all, you need a “licence” for one of those in this place we call ‘Great’ Britain.
I just happened to spot a comment at the bottom of that BBC article which very briefly summarises what she found, apparently somebody else spotted the catch too:
Very well-said!
Similarly, my wife found that the sample period they (so carefully) ‘chose’ covered the period before practically anyone was vaccinated! That confused her, so she delved deeper. She then found that quite a few people had started being ‘vaccinated’ during that early period but, and here’s an extra ‘mini-catch’, the ONS definition of being ‘vaccinated’ is someone who has had both doses, PLUS 28 DAYS. In other words, 29 days after your second shot is the first day you are considered ‘vaccinated’.
So what does this mean?
Well firstly, hardly anyone in the UK in the period cited by the BBC was actually ‘vaccinated’ by the published definition. But MANY had had the first, or even second shot, but were still marked in the column labelled ‘UNVACCINATED‘ as 28 days had not yet passed.
So in a country where virtually nobody was ‘vaccinated’ (by the proper definition), it isn’t quite so shocking any more is it, to find that most people who died were ‘unvaccinated’.
Why doesn’t this appear on all the opinion-checking websites (aka ‘fact checkers’) marked as “partly false” or “missing context”. Ha, can you imagine the furore at the Beeb if that happened, I would pay to be a fly on the wall for that discussion! But that’s enough daydreaming…
I do wonder how many of those deaths had had one shot or two shots without 28 days passing! But as per most FOIA requests that have been made on this issue, I expect that might result in a response with the now familiar wording of “That data is not available as it is not collected”. Yawn.
The BBC – Another day, another lie.
Pretty pictures can often say a thousand words, so have a look at the chart below which I took from coronavirus.data.gov.uk:
That shows all deaths for the past year (reported up to November). Now let me adorn it with some red pen to show the extent of the period they chose to use for their ‘news’ piece:
(The period the BBC article refers to starts at either A or A2, and ends at either B or B2. I can’t be sure because the article only gives us “deaths between January and July” so I have included 1st Jan and 1st Feb as a start point, and 1st July and 1st August as end points to cover all possibilities.)
The 14th February saw the first 15 Million milestone of first doses administered. Remember a first dose does not make you classed as vaccinated according to the official definition. A2 is my best guess at 1st Feb on the chart, so move that to the right half way towards the 1 Mar 2021 marker, and that’s the point when the first 15 million had first doses. Hmm, but maybe some of those also had their second dose. (Critical thinking is a pain in the ass isn’t it! Maybe that’s why so few people do it).
No, I can do this better…
10 minutes of highly-skilled internet browsing later…
Ok, I have found the NHS England Vaccinations Archive where you can download every spreadsheet summary ever produced on Covid vaccinations, and to be kind to the BBC I picked 31st January. There will obviously only be less people double dosed back on 1st January if that’s when their data refers to as a start point. Having said that, I found that the NHS didn’t even produce a report that far back, the first was on 11th Jan). Here it is:
So on 30th January 2021 just 489,885 people had received two doses of the vaccine. (Don’t forget that the ONS definition for “vaccinated” is not two doses, it is two doses plus 28 days, but again I shall be unnecessarily kind to the BBC and forget about that here).
The latest available ONS figures for total UK population is 66.8 Million.
489,885 is 0.73% of 66.8M. That’s the maximum percentage of Britons who were “vaccinated” on 30th January (obviously less if we factor in the “plus 28 days” ONS requirement).
What about further along, where the death rate has really come down to the bottom of that ‘mountain’? Well how about 1st March, the huge spike is well and truly over by then, how many Brits were “vaccinated” then?
It’s still a paltry 599,935, or 0.898%. Yet more kindness, let’s round that up to 0.9% of the population.
Conclusions? Well I have two.
1. I am a plonker. Why the hell did I go to all that effort, John_316 had it pretty well covered with his comment didn’t he!
2. 256 is 0.5% of 51,000. So the BBC headline that ‘only 256 of 51,000 deaths had two doses’ just means that 0.5% of the deaths had two doses. Considering the fact that, for that early period where most of the deaths occurred, no more than 0.9% of them had had two doses, this suddenly doesn’t have the same impression the article clearly intended to invoke, and presumably did on 99%+ of its trusting (dumb) audience. See why I am not part of that “trusting” audience?
And please remember, I am not in any way trying to prove a counter-claim here. Nothing I have said above proves anything about vaccines or their efficacy/inefficacy.
It simply proves that the BBC misleads its audience.
Why would anyone in good conscience (or good science for that matter) deliberately choose a period in which virtually nobody was “vaccinated” for the part which had the huge majority of deaths, when trying to show the rarity of deaths in “vaccinated” people? After all, they wrote the headline:
“Covid deaths rare among fully vaccinated”
(Let’s prove it by showing data from a period when hardly anyone was vaccinated when 99% of the deaths occurred?! Nobody will notice!)
Summary
So now you know partly why I don’t trust the BBC any more, and it didn’t take just the recent examples for me to come to that decision, it took the cumulative effect of probably hundreds of minor instances where I felt they were biassed, hiding part of the story, lying, or just outright preaching their political or social(ist) ideology to me.
Afterthought
And all of this obviously ignores the not-so-small issue of ‘What is a Covid death?’ I know personally of people who have died since this ‘pandemic’ began, who were put down as Covid deaths on the death certificate (one has been undone now after a law suit was threated, hoorah for truth and justice!) yet none of them were remotely ’caused by’ Covid. I know of many more via friends and family, exactly the same.
Published NHS Covid19 Death Records all say the same thing on the spreadsheets, explaining what gets your death included in the Covid19 death count, and it’s pretty straight forward:
“This file contains information on the deaths of patients who have died in hospitals in England and have tested positive for Covid-19”
I won’t bother going into that, we all know the natural question it leads any reasonable person to ask.
Remember how all the news channels told us “xx people died of covid today”, in those early months of Covid? Then they slipped in that little adjustment changing it to “XX people have died after testing positive for Coronavirus”.
The difference may be subtle in the wording, but vitally important in the meaning. And it also tells us that every day prior to that change, the news was basically lying to us, to everyone, over their morning coffee and evening meal, day in and day out.
I think they later adjusted it further to “died within 28 days of a positive test”. Bummer isn’t it, when you test positive for something you didn’t know you had because you had no symptoms and felt totally fine, but got hit by a bus a few weeks later. Pesky Covid! You’ll make the nightly news tomorrow!
I may laugh, but this really is not remotely funny. Once upon a time government used to allay the fears of its public, but this Covid thing has changed all that and it seems any chance to spin up the fear just can’t be missed. It’s more than a little curious. Why would you want a public more scared than it needed to be? We can only guess.
My friend’s father in law died a while back, very old and terminally ill. He tested negative for Covid upon admittance to hospital, died around 5-6 hours later in the night (family expecting him to die any day), death certificate said SARS COV-19. Thankfully they have finally had that rectified and replaced with THE TRUTH. Just how many ‘Covid deaths’ were not Covid deaths at all? We will never know.
One thing I do know is that they will certainly protect us from the most dangerous pandemic of all time: A pandemic of truth.